Content

Proseminar: AI and the Economy

Course Overview

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently received a huge amount of interest. While managers are enthusiastic about how to employ AI in their firms, the general public is concerned about whether AI will replace their jobs. In this course, we will examine these and other questions related to the impact of AI on firms and the broader economy. Our goal is to look beyond the “hype” on AI by looking at recent research in management and economics that tries to give a rigorous answer to questions related to the impact of AI. We will look at questions such as:• What is “AI” and what drives the recent developments in AI?• How do these developments relate to the history of AI?• How can firms use AI in the context of their businesses?• How will the use of AI impact competition between firms?• What types of jobs is AI likely to replace? Which jobs will flourish due to AI?• What will be the impact of AI on the broader economy?• What are ethical questions related to the use of AI?• Do we need to regulate AI?We will look at some very simple examples of actual AI models recently developed in machine learning to better understand how they work and how they can be applied in firms. However, this is not a course where you learn how to program and implement AI yourself. We will mainly try to understand AI conceptually by looking at non-technical research on AI. If you are interested to learn how to run AI models, please take advantage of the courses in statistics that are offered in your program, such as “Data Analytics in Strategy Research” by ISTO, as recent AI methodologies are based on applying statistical models on large datasets.

Course Structure

The course is organized as a mixture of lecture-style sessions in the morning, where we will introduce the topics and discuss basic concepts, and workshop-style sessions in the afternoon, where students will work together in groups on selected topics or where we will discuss topics in a more open fashion.